Posts by Bob Munro

Ryder seems to have that marvellous ability to be seeing and reacting at a sort of different rate than most. It's like he's seeing the world go by slightly slower than the rest of us and has more time ro react. I used to get that sense when watching Martin Crowe bat and it was really on show when I saw the greatest sportsperson I have seen in the flesh- Wayne Gretsky - get his 1000th assist at a game in Edmonton way back when.

One of the pleasures of the game in Christchurch was being able to watch Ryder. He is such an incongruous looking figure for a sportsman. He is languid but remarkably fast and accurate in the field. He seems to be always in the covers, slips or short forward positions. At one point he was at deepish cover and the ball was hit quite sharply directly at him. Rather than pause on his trot in with the bowler he just kept on going, running upright, reached down with one hand as he met the ball and threw with the next stride.

He was having throw downs right in front of us at the beginning of the game when all the players were practising. The ball off his bat had a crisp thwack to it, a sharper noise than the other batters practising. His defensive shots are truly examples of ‘soft hands’ as he seems to be able to deaden the defensive stroke so there’s no chance of the ball carrying to a fielder. Even the ball he went out on after top scoring was a clean hit pull to mid-wicket off the front foot. It just never quite cleared the boundary and was caught.

He is genuinely charismatic as a player: like Chris Cairns or Chris Harris. You are always aware of him on the field even when he’s not actively involved in the play. Long may he grace our summers.

As for the whole ridiculous security carry on, (no thermoses in Christchurch), surely the acres of empty seats is sending some sort of message to the organisers. There aren't many places where as a paying customer you are treated like a smuggler when you go in and potential pitch invader while you are there, wherever you are seated.

On Saturday, friends from Timaru up for the cricket reported roiling brown water seething under the Rangitata and Rakaia bridges. You may recall John Campbell trying to insist to power company executives that we were in a power crisis due to low lake levels last winter. Well already Lake Tekapo is being spilledand Lake Pukaki is a metre off full. And that was last week before the weekend rains.

Roger Ebert in his journal and his wonderful comments section explore doom and gloom form a myriad angles.

It's a crime to just extract one paragraph.

I dreamed, we all dreamed, for years that the future held vague visions of progress and prosperity, and that our problems would be "solved" by science. How many of us are so sure about that now? I wonder if we are living in the End of Days. I do not mean that in a biblical sense. I mean that we seem to be irrevocably screwing things up. In the case of the global warming problem, we may have already done so. Please, please, don't tell me global warming is Al Gore's fantasy. I am reminded of a great line by Saul Bellow. A dying man tells his brother: "Look for me in the weather reports."

On a completely different topic. I thought I was having a senior moment last night watching ‘Lost in Austen’. I was clicking over to the cricket on Prime during the ads as well so it might just have been me but I could swear there was a cut in the scene where Amanda appears to sit down at the piano to entertain Mr Darcy, Caroline and Mr Bingley, then gets up with Caroline saying rather sarcastically ‘well at least you can sing.’

I wandered around the net a bit and found that she in fact sings Downtown’

Okay maybe I missed a rather large chunk of it watching the cricket but then found this on a blog about the series.

The down side to the DVD is that a very greedy copyright owner of 'Down Town' has forced the deletion of the song from the DVD. What a pity!! The song is essential to the plot. The exclusion means that an exciting song will never be part of a superb drama series.

So was it just me not paying attention or was ‘Downtown’ cut from the scene last night?